Friday, April 19, 2013

Coursera HCI Needfinding: Remote Pair Programming

Scott Klemmer's HCI class is great, but I think one thing that would make it even better would be if all the students design submissions were public on blogs for all to share and see (assuming student consent). I love to share, so here's my assignment 1:

Design Brief: Change

I observed groups of programmers programming together, trying to improve their programming skills and change themselves from less experienced programmers into more experienced programmers.

Describe how three people performed an activity related to the brief you chose. In particular, you should focus on a particularly interesting moment/breakdown/workaround from the observation. Upload a photograph or sketch of each person performing the described activity, with a short caption.

1: microphone not working for one remote programmer and that programmer used skype text chat to stay in touch [video time 10:50, 22:03, 41:22 51:38, 1:08:48, 1:22:00]

2. One user learns from the other about a coding abbreviaton ("rails c" for "rails console") [video time 13:30]

3. Use of reference to line numbers in text editor to help focus on particular things in the session [video time 49:56, also at 58:28]

Here are my detailed notes on the actions of the participants, M, J, and S:

3:30 working out how to add an epic in pivotal tracker

6:37 J using putty for some reason

8:44 J zooming size of screen (discussion of use of vi in the background)

10:50 S using Skype chat because his mic is not working, he can hear the other two, but they can't hear him

13:30 inspecting models from database in rails console, J types "rails c" which M had not known was contraction for "rails console"

14:55 J uses highlighting to point out link with the token for the login

15:36 J already did some test install based on link S sent? was an older version, lead to some errors but then J followed some more instructions on the devise website?

17:18 chrome gets stuck, but no big deal

19:36 M wonders where she is - navigating pivotal tracker

20:40 generating feature description? should this be coming from client

22:03 more text chat from S

26:23 M confirms the "so that" part of the feature is basically a comment

29:12 M thought that some menus were in spanish, but J says no, but they moved on

32:15 comparing tracker numbers in feature - wish we had links - there was confusion about which story they were working on

35:15 M interested in tab completion

35:45 M couldn't see the terminal at one point. J moved it down

37:52 J playing with zoom again

40:32 M suggests password field and then need for pipe symbol

41:22 Skype chat popup lets M know that S is texting to indicate 8 character restriction an be changed. Just after another popup indicates chatting on Skype in an unrelated discussion --> would be good if one could get a general heads up on the relevant chat …

44:36 M suggests changing Then to When in feature

~46:30 J asks for confirmation that they have finished everything they need in the scenario

49:28 discussing whether the user name is in the system, or only the email

49:56 M pointed out indent issues to J used line numbers to indicate where to look

50:48 M unable to hear J, asked for confirmation- he was checking again if they'd finished